In my past endeavors, in addition to focusing specifically on the somatic perception of pain and the perception of time in women with chronic illnesses, I've also delved into how everyday natural elements (such as herbs, water, and light) can serve as potential therapies for pain. I aim to explore how to offer new pathways of perceiving nature for chronic patients within the framework of illness perception, and how to distill and establish loosely intertwined structures with the natural world through artistic practice within limited mobility and space, ensuring safety while facilitating experiences.
Herbs with estrogenic components are often enmeshed in a specific narrative shaped by the white colonial patriarchy, intertwined with "pure" nature, feminine deities, and connections to facilitating (heterosexual) reproductive functions. Humans continually transform nature through culture out of fear, leading ecological discourse to result in colonial and binary relationships between nature and culture. The best way to dismantle cultures is not by attempting to erase their gods and goddesses, rituals, and myths, but by fully absorbing them. As Starhawk mentioned in "The Spiral Dance," what gives potency to the goddess tradition is its relevance to us now, in the present, rather than whether others worshipped this specific image in the past.
I regard this series as a site of resistance, experimentation, and negotiation, reconstructing and deconstructing their original forms based on the narrative logic connecting plants to women's pathologies. Through emulating the techniques of the divine "creators," I seek to re-present them, reimagining and inscribing the connections between such herbs, diseases, embodiment, and sensory experiences. My practice emerges from a profound spiritual commitment to the connections between the body, healing, and the interplay of magic and political action.